by: Amanda Griffiths, LPAlliance

The Principle of Non-Aggression.

If politics is flux, and war is politics by other means, one cannot predicate a political ideology on a principle of non-action.

Libertarians claim to abide by a principle of non-aggression, which is to say, an opposition to the initiation of force to achieve social or political ends. We libertarians have been taught to imbibe and rattle off this little principle—so quick, pithy, and enticing in its pacifism—any time the question of our ideology’s identity arises; and to accept as given that non-aggression is our ultimate priority. That is a mistake.

I am writing, first, to plead that we put ourselves in a position to do greater justice to what both libertarianism and non-aggression are in fact for; and that requires us to question what we have been fed regarding out non-aggression’s identity and place within our doctrine.

This is not to dismiss the value of non-aggression. Indeed, it is to reevaluate and resituate its role so that it can structure and support a truer, more efficacious, libertarian politics in both theory and in practice. That non-aggression is a libertarian value is important, and we can interrogate its rationale in order to arrive at a more holistic, deeper, articulation of libertarian principle.

Let us consider the non-aggression principle: The opposition of force to achieve social or political ends. Already we have an issue—and the issue is opposition itself. The teleological core of an ideology cannot be negative. That is: No political ideology can survive in or for itself if it identifies itself fundamentally as being opposed to something else. Opposition neither comes, nor does it put itself, first in the order of things. Opposition necessarily follows something else—the thing opposed—and for a particular purpose. Otherwise, nothing impels it. For what reason do we oppose aggression? That must be our first question. It is not enough that we answer “liberty”—liberty is too unspecific. Instead, we must ask: For what reason do we seek liberty? Why is liberty a good? This answer is multifaceted and can be discussed at length elsewhere. For now, it is enough to say that whatever the answer, that must be our vital principle.

As for the rest of it, neither the Anarchist-as-anti-statist, nor the libertarian-as-anti-aggressionist, nor anyone who espouses a negative principle as the foundational premise of his ideology, will ever win a war against the state as it exists. The politics of against is a politics of fundamental inaction; a runner that cannot get started.

We cannot forge a viable politics of inaction, first, because inaction limits the scope of possible modes available to us as actors. This is toxic in the political realm, the realm of contingency, where any and every event is possible and so must any and every action be. If we identify ourselves as being fundamentally against an action—such that to commit that action is to violate existentially who we are—then we cannot allow ourselves to perform that action, not under any condition. If we identify ourselves as being for, then we can permit ourselves theoretically to perform any action in service of what we are for; since not to do so when it is necessary—not to act for what we are for—would constitute a spiritual suicide. Against may follow from for, but it must always come subservient to for if we wish to survive in a political world. In politics, in life, we must be willing to violate all of our againsts if it is necessary to save any of our fors.

Negative values—such as non-aggression and anti-statism—may be our ideological corollaries, but they cannot be causes in themselves, not while we are fighting for a cause and are the underdog. If we wish to be non-aggressors or anti-statists, we must be something else first—we must be non-aggressors or anti-statists because we are something affirmative, creative—and only then can what we understand to be the malignities of aggression and statism be combatted successfully and by any measure.

The Initiation of Force.

Advertising non-aggression as our chief ideological principle is yet another reason for which our Party presently finds itself so beset by so many libertarian atomists, isolationists, and ironically, nationalists. Much of the allure these figures find in the non-aggression principle owes to the fact that the terms that comprise its definitional terminology—“initiation” and “force”—are at once too vague and too restrictive.

“Force,” for its part, can be defined as broadly as the speaker likes, often to encompass anything that the speaker finds distasteful; and the premise of “initiation” can easily be forgotten entirely or interpreted in the most expansive terms, such that only the strictest, most particular, and most immediate forms of individual self-defense are acceptable to the speaker. Otherwise, the premise of “initiation” is weaponized such that it permits us to fashion from the non-aggression principle a toxic and double-edged spear of isolationism, with the insistence that to engage in a defensive act on behalf of, or in alliance with, another is to initiate force against someone else’s aggressor, who—though he might have initiated force against a fellow—has not yet or does not otherwise intend to set his sights on the one. Eventually, a true zealot can interpret the non-aggression principle as a proscription against intervening to compel a matter in one direction or another—writ large, to pursue a purpose outwardly—unless prior aggression is present, and often unless it is present against ourselves alone. This is hardly hysterical conjecture. Already this latter, extreme reading of the non-aggression principle has be used to argue that any social movement, particularly on matters such as LGBTQ rights, is aggression against the spectator.

A political ideology that understands itself thus is a political ideology of complete atomism. It is not politics at all. It is fantasy.

Yes, the premise of non-aggression was meant to simplify a number of ideas that libertarians reject and to render that rejection categorizable. But this simplification, this distillation into all libertarian ills into aggression, has made our ideology out to be harmfully facile—if indeed it has not stifled it from developing into an ideology at all, for again, no ideology can be fundamentally negative.

Our politics must always be for something first. Otherwise, our politics is mere reaction rather than expression in its own right. Politics is innately positive insofar as it impels itself toward something. Liberty, for its part, is neither positive nor negative—Berlin’s is a false dichotomy—but what is certain is that liberty is active. Non-aggression is fundamentally negative and passive. It is a statement of inaction unless, and the substance of that great unless—“the initiation of force”—is dizzyingly vague in practice.

Ultimately, then, we come to find that a principle of non-aggression is essentially meaningless when taken as the summum bonum of an ideology developed for the realm of the political, a realm in which any and all action can be construed as aggression. From and toward a still deeper principle, we may derive a value of non-aggression. We may identify a right to resist aggression. But to attempt to construct a politics upon a principle of non-aggression is to attempt to construct a building absent ground.

It may yet appear tempting to argue that an ethical politics permits no acceptable form of pre-emptive force. But this is to forget the innate intersubjectivity of politics, whose dynamics are merely an extrapolation of the market’s. A hostile relationship between two organizations necessarily influences the affairs of the other organizations within the same sector, and by extension all those who interface with it. An organization that commits fraud against one consumer threatens, if it does not implicitly commit, fraud against the others. An organization that engages in theft or else threatens the market ecosystem through malfeasance is a threat to all participants within that ecosystem. Certainly, then, if an organization with a monopoly over an industry aggresses against one of its consumers, it aggresses against all its consumers, who by dint of monopoly now find themselves with no exit, particularly if they are forced to engage in business with that organization.

Accordingly, when the state—the organization with the monopoly on governance—aggresses in any manner against any of its subjects, it aggresses against us all. If the state violates its contract of governance with any one of its subjects, it rejects the terms of its fidelity, and hence its fidelity itself, to all of us who are incorporated, routinely by conscription, within that contract. Even the act of conscription, however, is aggression. In politics, to speak of non-aggression is to speak in tongues. Politics is a state of aggression. The state is the permanent aggressor. It is not that there is no acceptable form of pre-emptive force in politics—it is that in politics, there is no pre-emptive force. In politics, force is always-already.

The Legitimacy of Violence.

The question now becomes whether, and where, political violence has a place in the liberty movement.

All political violence possesses a theoretical legitimacy, buoyed on the one side by the state’s absolute property to aggress permanently; and on the other by the people’s absolute right to resist aggression.

State violence is politically legitimate, ipso facto. This is not a normative claim; it is an empirical one. The state is the ultimate arbiter of the institutional power within a polity. The state sets the bounds of effectual right and wrong within its borders. The state dictates those identities, actions, and transactions that are allowable and those that are not. The state defines the individual according to the state’s chosen parameters of legibility—those markers (race, ethnicity, gender, and so on) that the state uses to delineate the human, not as a who, but as a what: A hodgepodge of qualities that can be distilled into data for purposes of institutional decision-making.

Each of these actions—the qualifying of the individual, the naming of the right and the wrong, the rule of the law—imposes an external, state-manicured moral identity upon the individual and the people, a moral identity whose role it is to constrain and delimit, a moral identity whose role it is to preserve and entrain, within the human mind, the state’s right of definition not merely over the people within its purview, but over that people’s own good. Co-opted thus, an individual and a people’s own good can no longer be their own at all. The institutions of the state operate in such a way that a people ultimately holds no politically legitimate ownership over its sense of “good”—a sense meant to derive from a person’s individual object of authority (be that authority a deity, a principle, or a cause). Put another way, for the state to usurp “our own good” means that the state usurps not merely our own authority over our own capacity to make valuative decisions, but the seat of whatever ultimate authority we choose to guide our actions. It holds our identity subject to the dictates that incorporate it. Whether monarchic, democratic, or republican, whether capitalist or socialist, whether fascist or globalist, the state has never ceased to be Leviathan.

Legitimacy is conferred by authority. This is true in the political—the authority of a constitution determines the legitimacy of a law—as much as the intrapersonal—the authority of a principle determines the legitimacy of an action. Each individual’s creative potential is maximized when he selects, and acts in pursuit of, an authority that he designates. When, by implicit threat of force, the state declares itself legitimate, it simultaneously declares itself the supreme authority over what is and is not ultimately legitimate. The state’s authority legitimately—in the eyes of, and by the fact of, its institutions—supersedes any authority that the individual chooses for himself. Politically, the state possesses and by its nature exercises the legitimate capacity to determine the individual’s own good.

Nothing of the above should be inferred as prescriptive, at least not as yet. That all political violence is theoretically legitimate does not mean that political violence should always be raised; that all state violence is politically legitimate ipso facto does not mean that state violence should always be thought right; that all rule of law is an imposition of state morality upon the individual does not mean that the rule of law should always be resisted. State morality may and very often does overlap individual morality, and the individual may hardly notice its imposition if he finds that imposition agreeable. Yet it is an imposition nonetheless: It derives from without, conveyed by an authority that the individual did not directly choose and that nevertheless holds ultimate power over his political identity as performed—up until this bond is ruptured at the moment of political resistance.

Any entity that defines as its right the ability to dictate both individual and collective good, and then to contrive a reality and institutions that render legitimate that entity’s compulsion, under penalty of violence, of individual and collective behavior in endorsement of whatsoever that entity considers to be the “general welfare”—is an absolute aggressor. Although not all modes and moments of resistance are equally appropriate in all circumstances, what is always true is that any entity aggressed against in such a manner has an absolute right to choose whether and how to resist that aggression at any time.

Perhaps the aggressor’s interest is truly the general welfare. Perhaps the aggressor has assembled for itself a technocracy whose expertise indeed generates a mathematically and scientifically accurate policy regime that will, if all matters play out just so, lead to social flourishing. No matter. The aggressor is still an aggressor; its actions are still aggression, even against the individual who agrees with them. This is so because the state-as-aggressor provides its object with no other legitimate way out of accepting its impositions; and in seizing his avenues of legitimate action, the aggressor seizes the individual’s identity as an object of normative reproduction. That is: The aggressor declares the function of the individual to be that of supporting and promulgating the normative system that preserves the absolute superiority and political legitimacy of the aggressor.

This is the purview of the state.

Even in an ideal polity, the state is the aggressor. Even in a libertarian polity, the state is the aggressor. Where the state exists, it aggresses. Where its aggression is resisted, it compels. Where its compulsion is questioned, it presides over the appeal against it—so long as the state retains its grip—to state-legitimated institutions whose purpose it is to reinforce the legitimacy of the state. The result is a permanent feedback loop of aggression and the state’s reassertion of the right to aggression. Even when the state or an agent thereof is found to have acted illegitimately, the state remains: It is the state, after all, whose legitimate right it is to rule a particular action or order of its own illegitimate. So, too, is the process of arbitration itself designed to reinforce the state’s legitimacy. Whenever it is challenged institutionally—for, we are taught from our youth, the state must be challenged institutionally for any real change to take effect—the target of dispute shifts from being the state itself to an isolated instance of state behavior; and it is the state as a whole that rules on the legitimacy of the state in one part and at one moment. The state is therefore shielded from disputation by the very fact of its disputation. The state’s legitimacy is reinforced by the very fact of that legitimacy’s being questioned.

Should the individual choose to defy the state, he may do so through politically legitimate channels—those that uphold the institutions whose role it is to reinforce the legitimacy of the state—or politically illegitimate ones—those that, by virtue of either their criminality or their non-institutionality, exist outside of politics. Because politically illegitimate defiance is politically extraordinary (it violates or occurs beyond the boundaries of established political order), politically illegitimate defiance can never achieve political change unless it intrudes into the political absent the consent of the state and in so doing threatens the prevailing terms of legitimacy and authority. In other words, in order for politically illegitimate defiance to have a political effect, it must force itself into the political realm. That is, in order for politically illegitimate defiance to have a political effect, must be somehow violent.

Because individual and popular political violence (and here I include popular political violence, which is to say, political violence engaged by a group of individuals) is politically extraordinary, individual political violence is not politically legitimate a priori; and because (or at least in part because) individual political violence is politically illegitimate, individual political violence is normatively legitimate. Individual political violence confronts the state with the political struggle absent which the state achieves its constitutive aim—stasis—and promptly ossifies from the loss of creative momentum. By the extraordinary nature of its force, individual political violence moves politics and imbues political experience with the life-sustaining dynamism necessary for politics’ continuity.

While individual political violence is not politically legitimate before it is performed, it realizes its political quality in its performance and hence the individual’s political status: Having rendered the individual a political actor against the present political state, individual political violence reconstitutes the individual as his own arbiter of right and wrong, just and unjust, insofar as by choosing political violence, the individual draws from an authority necessarily beyond the state to perform contentious action within it. Through violence, the individual therefore incorporates his authority within the political despite the state’s rejection of that authority. Individual political violence’s raison d’être is to resist and challenge the state’s claim to absolute authority. This is what makes individual political violence legitimate—its force.

The Tragedy of Anarchism.

In order for the political to evolve itself toward individualism, we as individuals must involve ourselves in politics. That involvement may be either institutional (that is, ordinary) or violent (that is, extraordinary). If we involve ourselves institutionally, we can only actualize the change we seek so far, since through institutional involvement, we credit the ultimate authority of the present regime of force. Violent involvement is more radical, since it forces our own authority against that of the state; but it is less certain both effectually and morally; and because of this, we suffer. Pursuing a cause through radical means requires us always to weigh the dangers of that pursuit, according to their risk of realization, against the dangers of pursuing it by more incremental measures. Nearly always, radical pursuit also demands that we cast aside lower-order behavioral values or personal behavioral morals—such as non-aggression—for the sake of an enduring cause that transcends the self—such as liberty.

In the agon between cause and conscience, the victor must always be cause.

To wait until one can see the whites of an enemy’s eyes—this is to wait too long. For, if the state is an inherently hostile entity, and we live in and among states, we must be theoretically capable of pre-empting that hostility. We must regard the state as the permanent aggressor, and therefore aggression against the state as justified.

But to aggress purely “against the state” entails yet another trap. Once again, in acting only “against the state,” we act for a fundamentally negative purpose. Political action demands a for; and not only that, it demands a cause for which we must be willing to undertake those behaviors that we are against. When our cause is liberty, those behaviors include the violence of situating ourselves in the role of the state and solidifying our mores in the form of its laws—which is to say, it includes not merely rebellion, but revolution.

At this point I am compelled to offer a few words on Anarchism. An Anarchist revolution definitionally defies any establishment of a state. That is because the Anarchist is definitionally an anti-statist—in other words, his teleological core is negative. It is, however, pure. Anarchists, the purest iteration of embodied self-ownership, are the heart and soul of any liberatory movement. Any liberatory movement that rejects them rejects the conscience of liberation entirely. Yet any mass liberatory movement led by Anarchists alone rejects the cause of liberation effectually.

Even the militant Anarchist still constrains himself in defining himself as an anti-statist before anything else. The tragedy of Anarchism is this: No matter how underhanded, no matter how quick, no matter how ruthless the Anarchist is, the statist is willing to play one last dirty trick that even the shrewdest, most cynical Anarchist cannot: He is willing to seize state authority. He is willing to raise and privilege himself above the masses. He is willing to become Leviathan. An Anarchist cannot do this and remain an Anarchist.

So Anarchism shatters in the presence of a hostile state: In order to survive against an enemy, we must be able to conceive of a scenario, no matter how extreme, unlikely, or short-lived, in which we would be willing to undertake any one of our enemy’s tactics for some greater purpose. Incidentally, this is another reason for which the teleological core of an ideology cannot be negative: There must be nothing the ideologue would not, theoretically, do in order to achieve his aims. Any adherent of any philosophy too definitionally pure for this axiom is condemned to expire at his enemy’s pleasure. It is an ugly truth that is no less true simply because it is ugly.

The cases of even the fiercest Anarchists demonstrate this fact with wrenching acuity: Because the statist is willing to do what the Anarchist, definitionally, is not, the statist can do what the Anarchist cannot; and so the statist, in obtaining political power, obtains all the trappings and the commands that come with it. He has the economy. He has the diplomacy. He has the weaponry. And even if the Anarchist has all these things of his own accord—the statist still has the state. He has the law. And he has the legitimacy to enforce it. He has both hierarchy and its helm.

The statist has the will to seize and wield all institutions of legitimacy for his purposes; and once he does so, he has the authority to mount every force of each institution against each Anarchist until every Anarchist vanishes from the earth.

The Anarchist calls this a dirty trick. The earth calls it politics.

That is why we cannot predicate a political philosophy on the premise of non-action. That is why no libertarian revolution can be wholly Anarchistic in its aims.

My frustration, as it regards Anarchism, is therefore born entirely of a shared love of liberty—as well as an awareness that, in the face of my own ideological impurity, Anarchism’s too-often sacrificial purity is required for the love of that liberty to survive in theory—just as much as its impure forms are required for the reality of that liberty to succeed in fact. If the Anarchists’ is a sacrificial purity, let that of ours who are not Anarchists be a sacrificial impurity: That we mar our own morals to preserve the integrity of our cause.

I reject statism; and my ideology rejects statism; but I do not define myself or my ideology as anti-statist. I do not foundationally write off the prospect of using the state as a means of fighting for liberty and self-ownership. And I am well aware that this is a dangerous bargain to make. I only make it because I see no other way of fighting for liberty, for individualism, for self-ownership in a way that does not risk terminally bargaining against them.

I break with the Anarchists on my willingness to go where they will not. Yet the world needs Anarchists, precisely because the world will go where Anarchists do not. The cases of the fiercest Anarchists demonstrate this as well.

So Anarchism must be defended by those who will do, for the sake of what they love, what Anarchists will not, for the sake of the same.

However much we value non-aggression, we still must be willing to engage in aggression in pursuit of that principle for which we value non-aggression. However so we define liberty, if political violence is required to attain it, then no amount of deference or temperance will change that, else we be defeated and our principles forgotten. We must be willing to do violence against the state through rebellion, and even to become the state through revolution, not any time it is possible, but every time it is necessary.

Qualifying the distinction between “possible” and “necessary” is an imperfect calculus, for once we determine that a deed is necessary and act accordingly, we will never know for certain whether we determined correctly. The seduction of inaction is that it is certain. Any time we choose nonviolence, we choose the luxury of knowing whether violence was necessary. Any time we choose violence, we choose to seal ourselves off from that certitude. But this is the crisis of all action: That it robs us the comfort of truly knowing what was required to attain our ends. That is the paradox of morality: That the only means of attaining perfect moral clarity is by standing completely still. If we do nothing and it ends badly for us, we can say we should have done more. If we do nothing and it ends well, we can applaud our rationale and restraint. If we are violent and it ends badly for us, then we can never know whether we should have done more or less. If we are violent and it ends well, we still can never know whether we might have achieved victory through peace.

That is what it means to say that we must choose cause over conscience: That for our principles to hold any meaning at all, we must realize them through action. We can never vouch for any action with perfect moral clarity, and still, we must act. We must act, and we must embrace the anguish that comes with it.

There is no true liberty that does not do violence to the fiction of certainty. That is hardly a reason to lay down arms.

Amanda Griffiths is an organizer with LPAlliance, an inter-caucus coalition rebuilding the Libertarian Party, and editor of The Torch, an online movement journal for libertarian and Libertarian Party discourse, news, and debate. She is also the creator of the wildly commercially unsuccessful “AGitPop: In Offense of Marxism”, a parody album about the Russian Revolution. You can follow her on X at AjaxtheGriff.